And now, his second-born son, Jack-killed, his gruesome death caught on film. And his oldest daughter, Rosemary, who he subjected to a disastrous experimental lobotomy, is left permanently disabled.

The man who taught his children that crying is a sign of weakness closed his eyes, and two teardrops fell down his cheeks.Īlready, he has outlived his firstborn, Joe Jr., a World War II navy pilot killed while flying a secret combat mission, as well as his free-spirited daughter Kathleen, who died in a private plane crash. Ted, his face tearstained, told him the awful news: “Dad, Jack was shot.” “Daddy, there’s been an accident,” she whispered. While Joe’s wife, Rose Kennedy, paced in her room across the hall from her husband’s, too distraught to talk, two of their children, Senator Ted Kennedy and his older sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, rushed to Joe’s bedside to perform the grim family duty.Įunice grabbed her father’s withered hand and kissed him. “But even more he was a man yet to be comforted by his family, yet to be told anything except that his son had been murdered.” “He was a helpless man who had lost a son,” Dallas observed. Three days earlier, when the news of Jack’s death had first broR ken and the world mourned the assassination of the dashing thirty-fifth president, private nurse Rita Dallas kept watch over his bedridden father. good-bye to return to her two small children, Caroline and John Jr., she leaves the flag near his bed-where, during the night, Joe’s niece Ann Gargan has innocently unfolded the flag and placed it over him. The man she calls “Grandpa” has been convalescing at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, too ill to attend the funeral. After the army bugler sounded taps, the military honor guard watching over the gravesite folded the flag thirteen times to form a triangle showing only a field of blue stars, as customary, then presented it to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the president’s stoic widow.Īnd Jackie wants her beloved father-in-law to have it. The flag had sheathed the president’s casket, borne by horsedrawn caisson to Arlington National Cemetery two days earlier.

Joseph Kennedy Sr., the seventy-five-year-old patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty, who once could sway prime ministers and presidents with his Irish charm, is suffering the lingering effects of a stroke, unable to communicate beyond moaning the words “yaaa” and “nooo.” Trapped inside his nearly paralyzed body, he struggles to pull himself free from the flag. The frail old man wakes screaming, tangled in an American flag-the same one that draped the coffin of his slain son, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, three days after his November 22, 1963, assassination.

James patterson kingdom of the cursed